Proserpine & Midas: "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos"

By Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on the 30th August 1797 in Somers Town, London, to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This rich heritage from which she was born was immediately disturbed by her mothers’ death when she was only 10 days old. Her father remarried four years later and despite the family’s’ impoverished circumstances, which led to home schooling by her father, who was in constant debt and with it the attendant financial worries, her education was rich with breath of subject and visits by poets and politicians including Coleridge and Aaron Burr. As a writer Mary is forever remembered with the birth of the modern horror novel with her classic work; Frankenstein. Mary was indeed a great talent and many of her other short stories, poems and plays are not recognised for their worth as they should be. However, her editorship of Shelley’s legacy is held in high esteem. Her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the many complications it caused, is certainly one of the short but great arcs of her life. She met him at 17 and lost him in 1822 when she was 25. Mary Shelley died on 1st February, 1851. She was fifty-three. The attending physician believed her death to be the result of a brain tumour. She leaves behind a legacy of works that are the equal of many. At the time society did not, in the main, approve of women writers despite the undoubted quality of their work. It was a different time. Today we are able to enjoy her works unhindered by the prejudice and moral codes of the times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stage Door
• Release date: Feb 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787374539

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist. Born the daughter of William Godwin, a novelist and anarchist philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a political philosopher and pioneering feminist, Shelley was raised and educated by Godwin following the death of Wollstonecraft shortly after her birth. In 1814, she began her relationship with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she would later marry following the death of his first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the Shelleys, joined by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, physician and writer John William Polidori, and poet Lord Byron, vacationed at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland. They spent the unusually rainy summer writing and sharing stories and poems, and the event is now seen as a landmark moment in Romanticism. During their stay, Shelley composed her novel Frankenstein (1818), Byron continued his work on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), and Polidori wrote “The Vampyre” (1819), now recognized as the first modern vampire story to be published in English. In 1818, the Shelleys traveled to Italy, where their two young children died and Mary gave birth to Percy Florence Shelley, the only one of her children to survive into adulthood. Following Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drowning death in 1822, Mary returned to England to raise her son and establish herself as a professional writer. Over the next several decades, she wrote the historical novel Valperga (1923), the dystopian novel The Last Man (1826), and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. Recognized as one of the core figures of English Romanticism, Shelley is remembered as a woman whose tragic life and determined individualism enabled her to produce essential works of literature which continue to inform, shape, and inspire the horror and science fiction genres to this day.

Book preview

Two Plays by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on the 30th August 1797 in Somers Town, London, to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

This rich heritage from which she was born was immediately disturbed by her mothers’ death when she was only 10 days old.  Her father remarried four years later and despite the family’s’ impoverished circumstances, which led to home schooling by her father, who was in constant debt and with it the attendant financial worries, her education was rich with breath of subject and visits by poets and politicians including Coleridge and Aaron Burr.

As a writer Mary is forever remembered with the birth of the modern horror novel with her classic work; Frankenstein. 

Mary was indeed a great talent and many of her other short stories, poems and plays are not recognised for their worth as they should be. However, her editorship of Shelley’s legacy is held in high esteem.

Her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the many complications it caused, is certainly one of the short but great arcs of her life.  She met him at 17 and lost him in 1822 when she was 25.

Mary Shelley died on 1st February, 1851. She was fifty-three.  The attending physician believed her death to be the result of a brain tumour.

She leaves behind a legacy of works that are the equal of many. At the time society did not, in the main, approve of women writers despite the undoubted quality of their work. It was a different time.

Today we are able to enjoy her works unhindered by the prejudice and moral codes of the times.

Index of Contents

Prosperine

A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

SCENE - The Plain of Enna, in Sicily

ACT I

ACT II

Scene – The Plain of Enna as before

Midas

A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

SCENE - Phrygia

ACT I

ACT II

Scene - A Splendid Apartment in the Palace of Midas.

Mary Shelley – A Short Biography

Mary Shelley – A Concise Bibliography

PROSERPINE.

A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

CERES.

PROSERPINE.

INO, EUNOE. Nymphs attendant upon Proserpine.

IRIS.

ARETHUSA, Naiad of a Spring.

Shades from Hell, among which Ascalaphus.

SCENE; The plain of Enna, in Sicily.

PROSERPINE.

ACT I.

Scene; a beautiful plain, shadowed on one side by an overhanging rock, on the other a chesnut wood. Etna at a distance.

Enter CERES, PROSERPINE, INO and EUNOE.

PROSERPINE - Dear Mother, leave me not! I love to rest

Under the shadow of that hanging cave

And listen to your tales. Your Proserpine

Entreats you stay; sit on this shady bank,

And as I twine a wreathe tell once again

The combat of the Titans and the Gods;

Or how the Python fell beneath the dart

Of dread Apollo; or of Daphne's change,―

That coyest Grecian maid, whose pointed leaves

Now shade her lover's brow. And I the while

Gathering the starry flowers of this fair plain

Will weave a chaplet, Mother, for thy hair.

But without thee, the plain I think is vacant,

Its blossoms fade,―its tall fresh grasses droop,

Nodding their heads like dull things half asleep;―

Go not, dear Mother, from your Proserpine.

CERES - My lovely child, it is high Jove's command:―

The golden self-moved seats surround his throne,

The nectar is poured out by Ganymede,

And the ambrosia fills the golden baskets;

They drink, for Bacchus is already there,

But none will eat till I dispense the food.

I must away―dear Proserpine, farewel!―

Eunoe can tell thee how the giants fell;

Or dark-eyed Ino sing the saddest change

Of Syrinx or of Daphne, or the doom

Of impious Prometheus, and the boy

Of fair Pandora, Mother of mankind.

This only charge I leave thee and thy nymphs,―

Depart not from each other; be thou circled

By that fair guard, and then no earth-born Power

Would tempt my wrath, and steal thee from their sight.

But wandering alone, by feint or force,

You might be lost, and I might never know

Thy hapless fate. Farewel, sweet daughter mine,

Remember my commands.

PROSERPINE - Mother, farewel!

Climb the bright sky with rapid wings; and swift

As a beam shot from great Apollo's bow

Rebounds from the calm mirror of the sea

Back to his quiver in the Sun, do thou

Return again